There are three possibilities (1). Mars is Dead. (2) Mars is alive. (3) Mars is stuck between living and dead. At present the evidence for 2 and 3 is weak, but there is no unequivocal evidence to rule either out. Life had to evolve from non-life, and there had to have been an intermediate stage, i.e. protolife. At some point we will encounter planets that are either young and still in the intermediate stages – showing a kind of non-cellular prototype biochemistry, or alternatively, planets that initiated the prototype stage, but were unable to move further to a fully evolved biochemistry. We should think about an evolutionary intermediate protobiotic stage on Mars, a first run at life that never cleared the bar. We should extend the investigation to ask whether we could detect the signatures of protobiological chemistries on other planets, including Mars. What specifically would we look for? I suspect what distinguishes a protobiologocal system from an inanimate but chemically active system, is a sustained departure from chemical equilibrium; i.e. evidence that something is/was “doing” something. This would not be evidence of life, that needs hands-on physical examination, but it would be evidence that a system was showing signs of locally overcoming entropy (with the emphasis on local for obvious reasons). If we find “pre-life” on Mars , then great, and if not, too bad, but we should keep looking, because knowing –not guessing- how a planet moves from dead to living is one of the fundamental pscientific roblems.